


The God Boy and the Soldier

by Tawabids



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Homophobia, Human Experimentation, Kidnapping, Mentions of Holocaust events, Minor Character Death, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-10-10
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:31:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik has been Shaw's personal soldier since he was a child, hunting his own kind for Shaw's plots and experiments. He knows no other life. But right when he thinks he will break, one of the prisoners offers him the chance to absolve himself. Charles has been hidden in the facility for years, his body and abilities tested to their limits, but together they may just have the strength to escape their fears and leave Shaw behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for [this prompt at the X-Men First Kink community.](http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/397.html?thread=628877) The prompt was: "AU where Charles never made it to the college, and somehow fell into the hands of bad people who had interests in his power, Erik was still with Shaw and trained into an killing machine. One day he ran into another boy in the research center, who was locked up and being experimented on like a lab rat. Whether they escaped together or went separate ways is totally up to the anon."

When G-d first began to speak to Erik, Erik thought he was being punished.

It was after Erik had killed an unarmed mutant for the first time, on one of his team’s ‘recruitment drives’. Sometimes people didn’t appreciate their children being recruited, and this kill had been particularly unpleasant. Erik had to throw those clothes out when he got back to the facility. 

That night, as he stood in the shower washing the blood from his hair, he felt himself shaking with sobs, his tears invisible when he turned his face into the showerhead.

It was then that G-d spoke to him. A voice in his head, _’Can you hear me?’_

It was unmistakeably real. Erik leaned his forearms against the wall of the tiny cubicle. “Yes,” he said. “Who are you?”

_I know why you’re crying,_ the voice replied. _I see her dying. But you were just following orders._

Erik slapped his wet palm against the tiles. “That’s not good enough!” he shouted to the empty room. It echoed around the shower block. His fellow agents had all gone home to their girlfriends, their wives, or to the bar to drink away the memory of the blood. 

For several long minutes, the voice did not return. Erik wondered if it had been a passing madness after all. Then it sprung like a clear fountain inside him the hot, starving desert of his mind once more. _I looked inside you. You can be a good man. I wanted you to know that. I don’t want you to cry._

It was the voice of a child, but that made sense to Erik. Of course G-d, who had abandoned him when he was a child, would return to him now in the same guise. To lead him back to a time before he was a murderer and a tool of evil. 

“Will I go to hell?” Erik asked quietly. 

_I have seen hell, but it is only what men make for themselves,_ the voice replied.

Erik switched off the water and let himself drip in the cool sub-basement air. “What do you want me to do?” he asked the menthol-green tiles, resting his forehead against his crossed arms. 

_I want you to meet someone._

\--

Why? Why would G-d speak to him after all this time, after all his prayers, after letting Shaw kill his mother and father? Was He too busy in those days, watching his children murdered in their millions? Was one little boy not important enough back then? Erik’s mother had promised him that G-d would _always_ be with him, but she had also promised that they’d be safe as long as they did what the police officers told them, and how wrong she’d been about that.

Erik was a good soldier, and he had lived for many years in and out of Shaw’s various bases, across Europe and now the expanse of North America. Though he didn’t have access to the research areas of the current facility, he knew getting in wouldn’t be a problem with a wink and a nudge. Most of the men – mutants and humans, the latter mostly ex-military – knew him by sight, and lack of evidence to the contrary (he wasn’t a sadist like half the other Old Boys that Shaw kept close to his heart) had given him a reputation as a likeable guy. 

“Hello, Erik,” Michaels, ex-marine with three lots of child support that he paid on the dot every week, was on guard outside the pens tonight. There would be two armed guards on the far side of the reinforced-steel door, but they wouldn’t question him once Michaels had buzzed him through. 

“’Lo, Mick,” Erik leaned his elbows on the edge of the guard station window and gave the briefest flash of his toothy grin. “Quiet night?”

“Always quiet since they installed the new live-wire system,” Michaels blew a long breath through his teeth and leaned back in his chair. “Electric shocks inside the walls. Haven’t had an escape attempt in months.”

“Pity,” Erik shook his head and lowered his voice to a stage whisper as he leaned forward. “Hey, you haven’t heard this rumour about them putting one of these _verrückte_ in with my team, have you?”

“Someone from the Pens? No,” Michaels frowned. The mutants in the cells behind Michaels’ door were those considered too dangerous or untrainable to be left to their own devices. Generally they were only kept alive because their powers were of particular ‘scientific’ interest to Shaw.

“Maybe it’s just gossip,” Erik shook his head. “Still, I was wondering if I could pop in and have a word with the guy? You know my team’s got a good dynamic going, I want to meet this cat, get a heads-up if I need to put my foot down.”

Michaels raised his eyebrows. “I’ll have to put you in my visitor book.”

“Oh, come on,” Erik flashed his grin again. He knew how rare a sight it was even among his own team, and that made it a valuable currency. “If Shaw knows I’ve been down here he’ll call me a meddler. Don’t make me a meddler, Mick.”

Michaels let out a long sigh and leaned across to tap in his passcode. He pushed the key to the cells through the tiny guard-station window. “You owe me, Erik.”

“I owe you a dozen,” Erik promised, giving a quick two-fingered salute as he headed into the highest security corridor on the facility.

The walls were so white he had to blink until his eyes adjusted. The halogen lights above had only a thin frosting over them and buzzed as Erik walked beneath. The key clinked against his thigh. He had an image in his mind, given to him by G-d: a plastic sign screwed into one of the solid, deadlocked door. It had read, UNIT 7. 

Erik found the seventh cell two-thirds of the way down the corridor, and the sign was just as he had seen it in his mind. With the briefest glance at the guards watching him from the end of the corridor, he unlocked the door. It was heavy, would have taken a solid push from a regular man. It was also metal, and swung open with a light press of Erik’s fingers. He stepped inside. 

The cell was a single room, not cramped, but Spartan – a toilet, sink and shower with a drain on the floor and no screen, a single bed with one pillow and a grey blanket, a small bookshelf boasting less than two-dozen titles. The most homely item was a threadbare but thickly padded armchair in an ugly orange and brown knit cover. A boy in pale blue scrubs like a theatre nurse sat propped up on the bed, reading something with a French title. He had looked up at the sound of the door, his sharp blue eyes meeting Erik’s gaze without surprise.

“Hello, Erik,” he said. It was G-d’s voice, older but recognisable, with the same affluent accent. “My name is Charles.”

\---

“I didn’t mean to trick you,” Charles explained, once Erik had shut the door firmly and Charles had insisted he take a seat. He had put the book aside, but not yet moved from his position on the bed. He was young, early twenties at the most but maybe still in his teens. Erik’s experience had been that all the mutants in the Pens were much older, hence why Shaw found it so much harder to make them to work for him. “You heard a voice in your head and made a hopeful assumption. I didn’t have the heart to correct you.”

“Still blasphemous,” Erik pointed out, perched on the edge of the worn armchair. 

“Perhaps.”

“Why did you ask me to come here?” Erik asked, his hands hanging between his knees. “Do you know what Shaw would do to me if he knew?”

“I very much do,” Charles said, raising his eyebrows. “To tell you the truth, I don’t completely know myself. I think I just wanted company, and didn’t really expect you to come.”

“Company,” Erik said, with a huff of laughter.

Charles glanced around his solitary cell. Erik nodded in understanding. “Guess you don’t get down to the pub much,” he nodded.

“Not so much these days,” Charles sat up properly at last and swung his right leg over the edge of the bed. The left one stayed where it was until Charles picked it up and dragged it around to match its mate. Erik saw the end of a cage encircling Charles’ foot and ankle, and sensed that the metal ran all the way up the young man’s leg to his hip. There was a cane leaning beside the bed, though Charles settled where he was, his hands on his lap.

“Skiing accident?” Erik guessed wryly.

Charles gave him a humourless smile. His voice took on a professional tone as if he was presenting a lecture. “Doctor Shaw hypothesised my mutation might manifest in the anatomy and electro-physiology of my neuronal cells. He insisted he needed a proper look at the biggest bunch in my body. I suggested he take one of the ones in my middle toes and get a better microscope, but you know he’s nothing if not ambitious,” Charles said, his voice biting. “So, goodbye sciatic nerve,” he slapped the paralysed leg gently. 

“Was he right?” Erik asked. “About your neuronal cells?”

“Good gracious, no,” Charles frowned, as if Erik had asked whether you were allowed to high-five the queen. “His grasp of biology is a load of crock.”

Erik laughed again and rubbed his hand down his face. After a moment of being scrutinised by the younger mutant he spoke. “I wish I could keep you company longer, Charles, but if I don’t get back to the guard room there could be questions.”

“I understand,” Charles said. The smile on his face flickered, and his hand rose to touch his temple. _But don’t be a stranger,_ whispered in Erik’s head.


	2. Chapter 2

Erik continued his life as Shaw’s weapon. For a few days he felt a crushing bitterness that G-d had not chosen to lead him out, but it was greatly softened by the voice that remained in his head. He continued with missions whose purpose in Shaw’s grand plan he couldn’t guess, or in snatching children for recruitment to that selfsame plan. But when he returned to his small apartment in the suburbs, he felt Charles’ presence like a moth fluttering towards the glow of his mind. Charles would glimpse wordlessly at his mood, at the images illuminated most prominently, and then ask him how he was feeling anyway. 

Most of the time, the answer was, “Angry.” 

_At what Shaw has made you,_ Charles said.

“At what I’ve done,” Erik countered. “I can’t blame my actions on Shaw.”

_But you can fight back,_ Charles answered. _The moment you turn back and resist him is the moment you are absolved of all the sins you feel responsible for. Even if he killed you in that moment, you would be exalted, you would be free._

So despite his claims against divinity, Charles fancied himself something of a prophet. 

“Are you telling me to martyr myself, Charles?” Erik chuckled. He was in his small kitchen, writing a list of things that needed stocking in the pantry. Behind him, the knife was chopping capsicums of its own accord while a whisk stirred the pasta before it could boil over. There were, of course, no wooden spoons in Erik’s cutlery drawer. 

_Heavens, no!_ Charles voice grew thick with distress and Erik winced. _I think I would go mad if I didn’t have your company, my friend._

“I think I was mad before I had yours,” Erik replied softly, and he could hear-see-feel Charles beaming like a schoolgirl on her first date. 

One night he asked Charles how long he had been under Shaw’s captivity. He expected the answer to be in months, and he balled his fists when Charles said, _Two and a half years._

“Your family?” Erik asked, barely able to reign in his fury, which would only burn Charles’ telepathic tendrils.

_My parents are dead. I don’t know what happened to my sister after I disappeared. She was in London, looking for work. I was a week shy of sixteen, starting my degree at Oxford, when they snatched me out of my dorm. It took me an hour before I realised this wasn’t a uni initiation rite,_ Charles giggled, a bubble of youthful humour, but Erik could feel the self-admonishment behind it. 

“Is your sister like us?”

_Oh, yes! I can’t believe I didn’t tell you!_ Charles said proudly, _Raven is a shapeshifter, incredibly talented. You’d tell me if she came up on Shaw’s radar, wouldn’t you?_ He added cautiously.

“Of course I would,” Erik growled. He could feel Charles’ memories bleeding through their conversation, images of a beautiful, round-faced blonde (a word that could only be Charles’ – ‘rambunctious’ – was tacked to the image), and beneath that a flash of blue skin and yellow eyes. “I’d never let them get their hands on her.”

_That’s kind of you to say. She’s a survivor, my Raven, so I hope it never comes to that. She has much better instincts for these things than I do._

\---

Throughout that autumn and into the first months of winter, their strange conversations continued without either of them setting eyes on each other again. They mulled over philosophy and history and played chess with the board in Erik’s apartment. Charles raved about genetics and the theories he’d read on human evolution. Erik borrowed as many books on the subject as he could and read them aloud, with Charles a knowledge-hungry eavesdropper in his brain, until they both fell asleep. The boy could only touch the outside world through Erik, and in turn Erik felt a new thrill of excitement and glee at the mundane – the colour of the trees, children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, the taste of pepsi cola – when it was broadcast by Charles. 

Sometimes Erik almost convinced himself that Charles really was nothing but a voice in his head. At other times – especially when the isolation and boredom dragged the boy into bouts of lingering gloom – Erik knew for certain that Charles was as human and complicated as himself. On occasional nights, Charles talked about killing himself rather than spend another day locked in this blank box.

“You mustn’t, Charles, please, _please_ , don’t do that,” Erik begged. He was so frustrated at being unable to physically restrain his friend that all the metal in his apartment began to rattle in frequency with him. “I understand why, I swear, and I wouldn’t blame you – but let me be selfish, promise me you’ll stay for me.”

_I will,_ Charles replied, though it sounded like it took all his energy to raise his voice about the shouting depression that he was trying to shield from Erik. 

On some rare days, Erik finished his work and found he couldn’t raise Charles’ voice. Sometimes he panicked, thinking his friend had broken his promise, or that something even worse had happened. On one occasion he even got in his car and drove almost to the gates of the facility, filled with rash plans of breaking into the research section, before his friend’s voice broke over him and told him to go back. Inevitably it turned out that Charles was simply asleep, or doing tests for Shaw, and Erik could relax at last. 

Shaw was convinced that Charles’ powers went much further than mere communication, that he had the potential to plant thoughts in the minds of others and control their will. Charles privately agreed, but only to Erik. He was afraid of what Shaw would make him do if his powers grew stronger and at the same time afraid that if he didn’t prove useful, Shaw would simply dispose of him.

_I’m trying to fake small improvements,_ he told Erik. _But he knows I’m not cooperating, I can hear it growing in his mind, and he gets so angry…_

“Give him what he wants, Charles,” Erik demanded. “Don’t let him grow bored of you. He’ll kill you on a whim.”

_Better than turning me into his weapon,_ Charles replied at once, and Erik felt his own thoughts grow stony. At once, Charles poured apologies down on him, genuine remorse filling Erik up like a cloud until he found tears pouring down his cheeks. _I didn’t mean it like that, Erik! It’s not your fault! You were just a child!_ he babbled. 

“Don’t apologise, Charles,” Erik said firmly. “I have enough self-blame for the both of us.”

\---

One afternoon, a routine recruitment was cancelled because the mutant in question had committed suicide in his father’s attic. Erik and his team hung around in the facility waiting for further orders and enjoying their afternoon off. Someone produced a pack of cards and another went on a beer run and came back with three-dozen cans and a large bottle of whiskey. They played poker and smoked Tuscan cigarillos. Erik showed off making vulgar shapes out of the empty beer cans and the laughter from his colleagues was so loud that when Charles’ voice first broke into his skull he could barely hear it.

_Erik! Something’s happening, they won’t talk to me, they’re taking things out of my room._

Erik forced himself to keep his face jovial and grinning as one of his teammates slapped him on the back. He tried to form a reassurance to Charles. It was probably a routine mid-winter cleaning.

_No, this has never happened before, this is different,_ Charles’ voice was frantic and uncontrolled. Someone had asked Erik a question and he had to make them repeat it. Annoyed and worried that his distraction was showing, he told Charles to just hurry up and read the minds of the orderlies.

_They only know I’m being transferred, they don’t know why._

Erik felt the first snake of unease wriggle in his belly. He got up from the card table and told his colleagues he had to take a leak.

“What, can’t it wait until the end of the hand?” someone complained. “Hold your booze better, Lehnscherr!”

Erik flipped his cards up. “Sorry boys, but if you know what’s good with you then don’t start an argument with a German about drinking,” he hurried from the room.

He had barely reached the toilets when Charles’ mind crashed across his so heavily that Erik had to clutch at the doorframe for support.

_ERIK, ERIK THEY’RE GOING TO LOCK ME UP! ERIK, HELP ME, DON’T LET THEM, ERIK, PLEASE, PLEASE!_

Erik dug his fingertips into his scalp, trying to think clearly through Charles’ unrestrained terror. He didn’t understand – his friend had been locked up for more than three years – what difference did it make…?

Now there were no words in Charles’ voice, just a stream of panic and flashes like flares bursting inside Erik’s skull. He saw as if he was standing in the white corridor of the Pens Charles’ small frame being dragged between two orderlies while armed guards kept him in their rifle sights from a few feet back. Erik could feel the orderlies’ fingers leaving bruises on Charles’ arms, could see Charles’ dead leg scraping along the floor as his good one kicked out desperately. He twisted and writhed in their grip but he seemed so, so small. Now Charles’ mental cry was nothing but Erik’s name repeated over and over again, not even a word but a pulse of thought, and Erik felt the reflection of himself in that pulse the way Charles saw him, as if his name was wrapped up in strings of hopes and ideas, friendjoybestfriendERIKfriendherohopesoul.

“Charles!” he croaked. He could see a door approaching, not in front of his eyes but inside his head, and it slid away to show a room that seemed to be filled with copies of Charles’ struggling form. But they weren’t copies, they were reflections, growing larger as Charles was dragged through the door and—

and—

Silence. 

“ _Charles!_ ”


	3. Chapter 3

That evening, Erik was summoned to Shaw’s office. He went there without hesitation, exchanging a joke with the marine who’d brought the message and who accompanied him along the way. He actually felt a bit sorry for the marine. If his orders were to eliminate Erik if he tried run, he would have quickly found a steel ceiling beam through the top of his skull. Luckily, Erik had no intention of running.

“Erik! Please, take a seat,” Shaw said cheerily, shuffling aside the papers he was working on. He took off his glasses. Erik settled into the hard wooden chair across from Shaw. Without looking at them, he noted the wire in Shaw’s spectacles, the buckle of his belt, the plated tin in his penholder, the iron handles in his antique desk. 

“Now,” Shaw entwined his fingers in front of him and leaned forward. His tone was firm but affectionate. It might have been called fatherly, except any reasonable human or mutant on the planet would have known Shaw to be the world’s worst father. “Do we need to talk about Charles?”

Erik kept his face calm and his voice light. “You know about Charles?”

“You haven’t met Emma yet, have you?” Shaw’s smile broadened. “She’s very sweet, you’ll like her. She picked up a lot of interesting telepathic shouts from the research wing this afternoon. Your name featured prominently.”

Erik gave a quirked smile. “Poor girl. Quite a racket, wasn’t it? I lost three poker hands because he wouldn’t shut up.”

“How long has he been talking to you, Erik?” Shaw asked. The affection was draining from his face.

Erik shrugged. “Few weeks? Off and on.”

“And why,” Shaw asked, “didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew. I’m sure I’m not the only one he’s been nagging.”

“Oddly, no one else has come forward.”

“Oh, well,” Erik scratched a bit of cigarillo tobacco from under his nails. “Seemed like a harmless kid. I assume, given how quiet he’s been for the last couple of hours, you took him out back and shot him.”

Shaw was watching him very, very carefully. Erik knew that his reaction to the man’s next words would determine his survival chances in the next twenty-four hours. Shaw leaned back at last and swivelled his chair as if satisfied with Erik’s story. “Nope, we’re just testing a new mental isolation chamber. Seems to be working. He hasn’t said anything to you?”

“Not a peep,” Erik smiled. Half the smile was for Shaw, but half of the smile was a rush of genuine relief. Charles was alive. “Good to have a little peace and quiet.”

“You’re telling me,” Shaw pinched the bridge of his nose and gave a grunt of exhaustion. “What a handful he’s been. I’m almost wondering if he’s worth throwing any more money at. He’s such a stubborn little bugger.”

“Hmm,” Erik frowned as if something had just occurred to him. He leaned forward, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “Might I make a suggestion?”

Shaw waved his hand. “Have at it.”

“I think he’s rather fond of me,” Erik said, injecting a note of disdain into his words. “And, well, you know kids need rewards for good behaviour. Perhaps if I visited him, brought him books or something, even took him for walks around the facility,” Erik laughed, keeping his face cold, “on a leash if necessary. You can keep playing bad cop, I’ll shimmy in with the good cop act,” he grinned the widest, most shark-like grin he had. 

Shaw watched him intently, shifting in his seat very slightly. Then he returned the smile, and Erik wished more than anything that he could trade brains with Charles for just a moment and know what Shaw was thinking. “Alright. No leaving the isolation chamber, no way, but let’s do a trial run of catching flies with honey.”

He put on his glasses again and turned back to his paperwork. “I’ll shoot you a memo in a day or two. Have a good night, Erik.”

“Good night, Doctor,” Erik said.

He went back to his apartment and made himself dinner with the radio and television both playing at full volume. It couldn’t block out the roar of silence in his head.

\---

The door to the cell at the very end of the white corridor slid open, and a second door beyond that. The room beyond was slightly smaller than the old cell but otherwise laid out the same. The difference was that the only light came from two lamps attached to a modified car battery, and water and waste was removed manually. There were no cracks in the mirrored walls for wires or pipes. That was good – that meant there were no microphones listening in on them either.

“Erik!” Charles cried, sitting up in the knit-cover armchair, which looked more picked and worn than ever. Charles, too, had grown older and thinner in the months since their last brief meeting. His skin was so pale it was almost opalesque and there were shadows under his cheeks that gave Erik sickening flashbacks to the camps. Erik shot him a warning thought, and Charles diminished into a hunched shape. 

He waited for the doors to close behind him before he strode across the room, lifted Charles’ scrawny form and crushed him into his chest. Charles wriggled and Erik felt a wash of embarrassment emanate from his mind. “I’m alright, Erik, honestly.”

“I thought they’d killed you.”

“Unfortunately not.”

“Don’t say that!” Erik drew back and grabbed his friend’s shoulders before Charles’ dead leg gave way. “Don’t ever!”

“Okay, don’t get your panties in your twist,” Charles rolled his eyes and then leaned into Erik’s chest again. “It is good to see you, my friend.”

“Listen, we’ve only got a couple of minutes. I brought you a book by Waddington,” Erik pulled a second-hand copy of _How Animals Develop_ out of his coat like a magic trick, along with a thin folder. “And a paper by someone called McClintock, I thought you’d find it interesting.” 

The young man’s face lit up and a wave of elation rolled off him that was so powerful it seemed almost worth Shaw’s discovery of them, just to present Charles with the gifts. “Thank you!” Charles’ glee echoed around the mirrored walls. He limped back to the chair to put the texts reverently down on top of its cushion. He looked back at Erik, and must have caught a few of Erik’s thoughts because he didn’t ask how Erik had gotten permission to visit. “Shaw’s not going to let this go on,” he said heavily. 

“He will if he gets results,” Eric countered, folding his hands in front of him. “If your powers develop—”

“I can’t!” Charles cut him off. “I won’t push myself! Not if it means Shaw gets what he wants.”

“He’s losing patience. He’s going to kill you if you’re not useful,” Erik warned.

Charles didn’t answer that for a moment. He glanced around his tiny world. “Alright,” he said quietly. “I’ll try. For you.”

“Thank you,” Erik turned as the door behind them slid open. The guards gestured that his time was up and he raised his hand to Charles. “See you round, kiddo.”

“Bye,” Charles responded morosely. As Erik stepped into the corridor he raised his voice. “Hey, what the dickens? Erik, this paper is about _corn_.”

“I’m told it’s revolutionary!” Erik grinned broadly, his arms spread wide as he took a couple of steps back. The door to the cell slide shut on Charles’ annoyed face. 

\---

From then on, Shaw allowed Charles half an hour with Erik for every new experiment that pushed the boundaries of Charles’ power. Given this incentive, he suddenly progressed in leaps and bounds. 

“They don’t hurt, these tests?” Erik rumbled, sitting cross-legged on Charles’ bed during their second prescribed visit. They didn’t talk as freely as they had when their conversations had been purely telepathic – perhaps after all this time, Charles had lost the ability to speak easily with his real voice, or perhaps they were both wary that Shaw might somehow be spying on them. 

Charles sat next to Erik, leaning slightly into the taller man’s side. His dead leg stuck out across the blanket. Erik was absent-mindedly lifting the cage up and down, and bending it gently with his ability. He was wondering whether there was a way for Charles to tap into his powers while Erik was nearby so that he could walk and even run without his cane. 

“It’s boring. Number-guessing games,” Charles mumbled into his other knee, which was pulled up to his chin. “They bring in one of the off-duty agents and tell him to count in one direction, while I make him count in the other. He gets a pay bonus if he manages to resist me and I get time with you if I overwhelm him.”

“And Shaw’s pleased with how it’s going?”

“Pleased as punch,” Charles rested his forehead on his knee. “Happy as Larry. Peachy keen.”

“It’s going to be alright,” Erik promised, draping his arm around his friend. “I’ll look out for you. I’m one of Shaw’s best and oldest successes, he’ll listen to me.”

Charles rumbled wordlessly, but his mind was not broadcasting, and Erik wasn’t sure if that meant assent or scepticism. 

Still, despite his expressed optimism, Erik was prepared for every contingency. He took a few metal scraps from a local dealer, filled a bag with cash, knives, bottled water, spare clothes and a first aid kit, then shaped the metal into an airtight, solid box with the bag inside. He buried it outside his apartment. 

\---

Eric and his team had just arrived back from one of the more ambiguous missions. They had been up since four a.m. and the day had been very dull. Everyone was pretty grouchy. Erik showered and changed as quickly as he could and was just tying up his boots and thinking about what to cook for dinner when the screaming hit him. 

It felt like he’d been whacked in the head with a sledgehammer covered in hypodermic needles. He reeled and managed to catch himself on the changing room bench. Through the gale of noise and pain, he heard one of his teammates asking him if he was alright.

“Fine,” he croaked. “Migraine.”

He grabbed his coat and bolted out into the hall, one hand pressed to the side of his head. For a moment he wondered if he was having a stroke, but as it went on the noise and the pain became clearer and clearer. The agony spread down his neck and arms, sending his heart into convulsions. 

It was Charles. Screaming. Opening his pain like a broken dam. Erik leaned against the wall, feeling sweat break out on his forehead and goosebumps all over his arms. A pair of secretaries passed by, one of them raising her hand to her mouth as she started to ask if he was alright.

“Fine,” he croaked again. 

He stumbled into the nearest bathroom, locked the cubicle behind him and vomited into the bowl. The screaming went on and on without a pause for breath.

And then it was like someone had shoved pillows over Erik’s ears. He flushed the toilet and heard the rushing water clearly, but the scream in his head stayed muffled. The agony in chest had faded to an intense but bearable ache, like the day after a marathon. Charles was doing this, Erik knew, he had realised he was broadcasting openly and put up barriers in his mind.

Erik couldn’t deny he was thankful. He got up and, wincing with every movement, went to the basin and splashed water on his face.

He looked at himself in the glass. If certain people didn’t tread carefully, someone was going to die tonight. He just wished he could decide who it was.

He’d dropped his coat in the doorway. He folded it neatly, the scream still ringing faintly in his ears, tucked it under his arm and headed for Shaw’s office.


	4. Chapter 4

Shaw was, of course, busy. So the secretary outside told him – she could see something was wrong, and offered him a handkerchief and a glass of water. He mopped his face and sipped slowly at the water. His stomach was still heaving.

“Do you know how long he’ll be?” he asked her. She was a pretty thing, blonde hair and a long, feline face. 

“About an hour, he thought,” she wound a sheet of paper into her typewriter and began to patter away on it.

“He’s down in R&D. If you give me your extension I’ll call you when he gets back.”

Erik gripped the arm of the chair outside Shaw’s office. An hour? What the hell kind of tortures was Shaw perpetrating that took an hour? 

“No, I’ll wait,” he nodded. She smiled and went back to her typing.

The scream went on. Sometimes it paused, once for a full five minutes – Charles seemed to have passed out or been sedated – but then it would return. Sometimes the muffling barriers would fail and Erik would grip his own leg until his fingers left bruises, trying to keep his reaction from the secretary.

At last it was silenced altogether. A babbling voice replaced it, full of tears and the befuddlement of shock. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Erik, I couldn’t help it, I’m sorry, forgive me, my friend, forgive me._

“It’s not your fault,” Erik muttered into his hand. 

“Sorry?” the secretary widened her eyes at him.

“Nothing.”

Soon, even the stream of apologies was cut off. Charles had been returned to his prison. Erik relaxed for the first time since the ordeal had begun.

Shaw strode down the hall a few minutes later, swinging his arms and with a barely-contained smile on his face. Charles would have said he looked _positively chipper_.

“Erik,” Shaw beamed. “I wondered if you’d pop by. Come in, please.”

Erik picked up his coat and followed Shaw into the office. He sat down in the hard wooden chair and refused the two fingers of whiskey that Shaw offered. 

“Now,” Shaw drained his own glass in one go and thumped it down on the desk. “You might have noticed a bit of a headache, but don’t worry,” he smiled the smile of a brilliant car salesman about to clinch a deal. “We’re installing the insulation on the testing room this week. You won’t hear a thing after that.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” Erik said.

“Oh?”

“Clearly,” he began slowly, “you think you can brainwash Charles into joining your side, as you’ve… previously succeeded in doing,” Erik phrased cautiously. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s a waste of resources and it makes him a long-term risk. Let me talk to him and instead convince him to join our cause.”

Shaw was frowning, shaking his head. He waggled his finger. “You seem to have got the wrong end of the stick, Erik. I don’t want Charles working for me.”

“You don’t?”

“God no,” Shaw winced and made a click with his cheek. “Mouthy little smartass like that? Nothing but trouble. No, I just had to confirm that mind-control is the natural progression of telepathy,” he ran his fingers around the lip of the whisky glass. “Evolution in action, Erik.”

“Not the Darwinian kind,” Erik said quietly.

Shaw laughed and pointed a finger at Erik. “You’ve been spending too much time with that kid. Anyway, now he’s proved my theory I know what to look out for. There are bound to be more like him and we’ve got to be prepared. One mutant against us is easy to deal with, but one mutant with mind control could raise an army. That’s why I’m testing anti-telepathy technology right now.”

“Testing it on Charles,” Erik said dully. He had done this. He had talked Charles into cooperating, and now his friend’s usefulness had run out. Shaw would torture him and destroy him however he pleased.

Shaw spread his hands. “Waste not, want not.”

Erik looked down at the polished wood of Shaw’s desk. The metal penholder was still sitting there, waiting for Erik to thrust it right through Shaw’s beady little eye. Shaw was clearly confident that Erik wouldn’t do that. And he was right.

“Can I make a request,” Erik said softly. “Sir.”

“Of course, Erik. I always welcome your contribution.”

Erik raised his eyes to look at the doctor. “Put him down.”

For several long seconds, not a muscle moved in Shaw’s face and hands. Finally he asked with precise lightness, “Charles?”

“Yes, Charles. He’s been here long enough. Put him down. As a favour to me.”

“Ah,” Shaw glanced at the ceiling for a moment, bringing the tips of his fingers together. “I see what’s happened. You got attached, didn’t you?” he held Erik’s gaze now, the smile gone from his face. “What, did you tell him you’d look after him? That you’d… I don’t know, make sure he got home? Is that what you told him?”

Erik didn’t answer.

“Christ, I cannot _believe_ you,” Shaw shoved himself out of his chair, leaning over his desk. “You forget what we’re trying to accomplish here. After all these years, you’re still a little sop on the inside.”

“I’ve never asked for much,” Erik said. “But I’m asking for this.”

“Sorry, Erik,” Shaw said coldly. “I’m not going to destroy perfectly good company property because you’ve got a little crush,” he lowered himself back into his chair. “You can go now.”

Erik got up. He walked out, past the pretty secretary who watched him with half-lidded eyes. He got down a flight of stairs and two corridors before he realised.

He was heading for the Pens.

_If you do this,_ he told himself. _Even if you survive, everything in your life will change._

And if he didn’t? Charles would die. Slowly. 

Charles, whose voice in his head he had taken for G-d’s voice and never really shaken the impression. Charles, who told him the moment Erik turned against Shaw he would be free. Charles, who had soothingly said he was just following orders, and Erik had replied, _That’s not good enough!_ Maybe Charles wasn’t G-d, but on the other hand, what better form for G-d to take than a lonely mind-reader?

The door to the Pens tore from its hinges with a scream and wrapped itself around the guard station, trapping whoever was unlucky enough to be on duty today. The armed soldiers on the other side of the door spun and dropped to their knees to fire. Their weapons slammed back into their faces in sync, breaking one man’s nose and knocking the other unconscious. Erik strode past. The halogen lights flickered above him.

When he reached the cell at the very end of the corridor he slapped his hands against the outer door, ripped it out of its slider and used it to shatter the mirrored inner doors before tossing it aside.

He stepped into the cell. 

Charles was curled up in his armchair with the blanket from his bed wrapped around his shoulders. They had shaved his head and there were a few spots of blood around the crown, the entry points of wires for electrical measurements or stimulations, Erik didn’t know or care. All he knew was that Charles, bald and thin-wristed, his cheeks hollow and his eyes defeated, looked like one of the souls in the camps where Erik’s parents had died. They had had no one to save them. Erik wouldn’t let that happen today. 

He held out his hand. “We’re leaving. Now.”

Charles reached for his cane and levered himself out of the seat, his mouth hanging open. The blanket fell to the ground, along with _How Animals Develop_. He looked at the book as if he was about to reach down and take it with him. 

“Charles, now!” Erik barked. He turned and knelt so that his friend could climb onto his back. The cane clattered to the ground as Erik stood up, but he ignored it. He sprinted out the door and down the corridor. Charles felt lighter than the equipment he and the other agents carried on many of their missions, and he could clamp the metal cage around his friend’s leg to hold him on.

A siren above was shrieking and there were fresh guards in the corridor. Erik disabled them with their own guns, slammed a few into the walls by their buckles and zips for good measure and took off down a side passage. 

As he kicked down an office door and ran through to an empty hall on the far side, a grinding pressure bore down on Erik and he gave a yell of surprise. In front of his eyes was his mother, dying, crying out, again and again—

“Erik?” 

The pain intensified and he fell to his knees. The camps, the bodies, starvation… Through a red haze, Erik saw four-inches heels click across the linoleum floor and pause a few feet in front of him. 

“Sorry, sugar. This is as far as you get,” said a clipped voice.

He could feel Charles trying to reach into his mind, but his friend seemed cut off as completely as he had been in the mirrored cell.

Erik managed to raise his head. Shaw’s blonde secretary was looking down at him with cold disregard. She narrowed her eyes and a new wave of horrors swept over him. 

Charles was on his feet and had pulled one of Erik’s arms over his shoulders. “This way, Erik, hurry up!”

As fast as he could and with all the strength he had left, Erik flicked his hand. The metal hinges of the nearest door broke off, taking the wooden door with them. The secretary stepped back quickly to avoid it and the pain in Erik’s skull let up. They turned and ran, Charles limping heavily on the dead leg. Erik grabbed him around the waist and half-dragged, half-carried him around the corner.

“No, no, this way!” Charles made him stop. “Through this wall. Trust me.”

Erik glanced at him. Well, he was a smart kid. He reached his power into the wall and felt for copper wires and steel reinforcement bars. He stepped in front of Charles and then hauled everything he could feel out of the wall, them shoved it back through again. The plaster and bricks crumbled away from them as if they’d been through a blender.

The blonde secretary – she had to be Emma, the telepath that Shaw had mentioned – was stepping around the corner in her dainty heels. Erik grabbed Charles and they both lunged through the wall into the room on the far side.

It gave off the impression of an operating theatre, but the machinery was too heavy and bleak. The bed in the centre of the room had cogs and wheels that allowed it to be positioned at any angle and height, and rubber straps hung off it. 

Erik realised that this was where Shaw had been torturing his friend. He glanced at Charles, who was hopping towards the nearby cabinet, just as Emma stepped into the gaping hole in the wall behind him.

“Hush, now,” she said, and Erik crumpled as the images returned, the pain, the fear, the worst grief he had ever known. He heard Charles smashing the glass front of the cabinet with his elbow as in his mind, Shaw looked down at him. In his memory he lay bolted onto a table much like this one, praying not to end up like the maimed and crudely-stitched figures of the other children Shaw had experimented on, some of them impossibly still alive despite all he had done to them, and Erik could not, could not escape—

Then he heard the secretary give a surprised cry and the pain lifted. Erik was on his feet in a second, raising his hand to toss her back against the wall, but he didn’t need to. She sat slumped against the far side of the corridor, her eyelids fluttering and her limbs shaking as if she was being electrocuted.

Erik looked around and saw Charles hanging off the handle of the cabinet with one arm, his elbow streaked with blood. His face was white and warped into a fierce mask of defiance, and in his other hand he was aiming what looked like a heavy, over-complicated megaphone attached to a thick electrical cord that disappeared into the cabinet. 

He released the trigger of the megaphone at last and dropped to the floor with a gasp. Erik hurried over to him and ripped out the handle and lock of the back door. Charles was panting heavily, but his eyes were triumphant as he looked up at Erik, holding out the megaphone. “Anti-telepathy ray,” he explained. “The effects of which I am intimately familiar with.”

“Not after today,” Erik put his hand over the device and then closed his fist. It crumbled into a twisted ball of metal. 

He helped Charles climb onto his back once more and then he ran.


	5. Chapter 5

“Where are we going?” Charles asked, clinging to the door of the car with the window cranked down. Erik decided not to ask him to close it. It was probably the first time he had felt the wind in three years.

“My apartment, I’ve got supplies ready to go,” Erik had the accelerator pressed hard to the floor, but it wasn’t fast enough. He leaned his powers into the chassis, urging it to forget gravity and friction. “And put your seatbelt on. I didn’t bust you out just to break your neck when I flip at the first corner.”

“Then don’t flip the car!” Charles countered.

“Why not? Takes me a second to right it,” Erik shot him a grin. 

Charles’ eyes widened. He put his seatbelt on. They shot through two blocks of suburbs without flipping the car. By this point, Charles had two fingers to his temple and was gazing into the distance.

“We can’t go back to your apartment,” he said heavily. “Shaw has agents there already.”

Erik cursed quietly. He turned up the next side street and headed for the freeway. When they reached it, he decided to ditch the car – its details were all on file at the facility. He pulled off the road when he glimpsed a rubbish-sodden canal close by. Once they were out on the grass he raised his hands and gave an almighty shove to send the car rolling down the hill and into the murky water. Even if Shaw got every agent on staff looking for it, it should take them a few hours.

Charles was already standing on the edge of the road with his thumb out. Erik jogged over to join him. “Anyone who picks us is going to take one look at you and drag us to the nearest hospital.”

“Please. As if anyone could drag us anywhere,” mocked Charles. He had his hand to his head once more, and the next car that ambled out of the darkness pulled over immediately. Charles muttered, “Just follow my lead.” his face was gripped in a look of intense concentration.

The driver was a middle-aged man with a belly bulging under his clean, white polo shirt. “You kids shouldn’t be out this late,” he said with a rolling laugh. “Your mom will be worrying!”

Charles went around to the passenger door. “Gee thanks, mister,” he said brightly, in a perfect local accent. “We missed the last bus, I guess.”

There was a bag of golf clubs lying on the back seat. They were too long to just push aside. With a grunt, Erik flicked his hand at them and the stems bent almost into right angles, giving him room to sit. 

“Where’re you headed?” the driver asked as he indicated and pulled back onto the freeway.

“Oh, just down the road,” Charles said. A few minutes later, the man repeated his question in the exact same intonation, and Charles repeated his answer. It happened again a few minutes after that, and again until they were deep in the city proper. Finally, Charles asked the man to stop and they got out. 

Charles shook the man’s hand through the window and smiled. His fingers brushed his forehead once more and the man drove away with a dazed look on his face.

“He’s going to be awfully confused when he shakes off your spell,” Erik rumbled.

“Don’t worry,” Charles said. “He won’t remember a thing.”

Erik looked at him sharply. “You can do that?”

“I have tricks Shaw didn’t guess even in his dreams,” Charles said with a smirk. 

“Yes, but why didn’t you tell _me_?”

Charles looked uncomfortable and shrugged. He was shivering in the night air, still dressed only in the pale blue, cotton scrubs and sockless boat shoes that had been his uniform during his captivity. Erik took off his coat and put it around his friend’s shoulders. He was too pumped with adrenalin to feel the cold.

It was laughably easy for Erik to break into cars. They picked a battered old Buick sitting out of sight from the nearby apartment block. It took some discussion before they figured out how to hot-wire it (Erik had been taught years ago, while Charles had read about it in a book at fourteen). The tank was only half full, so Erik kept a gentle pressure on the gas pedal and used his powers to keep the car’s momentum rolling. Charles insisted on switching on the radio, it being something of a novelty for him, and then fell asleep under Erik’s jacket to a string of rowdy gospel songs. 

They headed out of the city and into the night. 

\---

There was, by a stroke of luck, a garbage bag of clothes in the backseat, intended for a mission. Charles dressed warmly in dark colours that make his sunless skin look wraithlike. They slept in the car that night, parked under the trees of a picnic grove away from the highway. A river ran close by, and they had to take off their shoes and climb down the bank to drink from the shallows. Erik felt cagey and agoraphobic away from any decent source of metal, but Charles laughed and slipped about on the grungy rocks, dragging his dead leg. His delight spilled out of him, his thoughts too full, his brain too bright to hide. It was lovely in a snatched, peripheral way. 

It was too cold to make separate beds and they slept bundled together on the backseat of the Buick. Erik remembered nights sleeping in his mother’s bed when he was too small to know that parents could die. The last careless thing he thought before he fell asleep was, _I am sleeping with G-d in my arms_. He hoped Charles hadn’t caught it, but Charles was already far unconscious. 

The next morning he jerked awake to the door shutting. Charles pressed his hand to the outside of the window. “Sorry! Go back to sleep, I’m just going for a piss.”

“We should get moving,” Erik said, propping himself up on one elbow. Dawn was just rolling over the low scrubland across the river. He yawned wide enough to hear his jaw click and Charles grinned at him and slipped away. 

A minute later, Erik heard a cry in his mind, waking him out of a half-reclaimed doze. He had lunged out of the car and bolted for the river before he realised Charles had called out in excitement, not fear.

His friend was on the bank, squinting out at the horizon.

“What is it?” Erik asked. 

Charles turned to him. “It’s Raven.”

“Your sister?”

“She’s here, she’s in the area. I just brushed her mind – too far to make proper contact, but I know what direction we need to go in.”

Erik felt those familiar snakes in his belly. “Are you sure it’s not a trick? Shaw’s telepath—”

“It’s not a trick,” Charles said. He repeated it, sounding a little offended, as if Erik had just asked him if he had trouble with his alphabet. “I know it’s not a trick.”

“I didn’t think your range stretched that far.”

“I’ve been practising,” Charles answered vaguely.

They got in the car and drove with the telepath choosing the turns. The wintered farmland was wide and barren around them, flat yellow grass and blanketed horses. Charles was quiet and kept his gaze out the window. Erik was lost in thoughts of worst-case scenarios, trying to prepare himself for all of them. He could not believe the coincidence that Charles’ long-lost sister, last seen in London, had happened to park herself down less than a hundred miles from the facility. He worked out probabilities in his head – no, not possible at all. But Charles was completely convinced. And Charles was, after all, Erik’s own personal prophet. He couldn’t argue with him.

Despite driving mostly on Erik’s powers, they ran out of gas before lunchtime. Erik just managed to keep the car rolling until they reached a service station in a small town whose name was peeling off the welcome sign. It looked deserted, but a bell over the door dinged as he stuck his head into the barn that had been converted into a mechanic’s. He felt instantly at ease among the cogs, beams, steel plates and wrenches. 

“Can I help you?” the back doors of the barn were wide open and a wizened grandpa with grease on his fingers was sitting on a wicker chair in the sun. 

“Thank goodness. Funniest story,” Erik tried to assume a tone of relief and harmlessness. “My brother and I, we’re out of gas. I left my wallet on the roof of the car a way back and we couldn’t find it when we went to look.”

“Doesn’t seem very funny,” the man said, narrowing his eyes.

“I was just wondering if we could borrow half a tank, I’ll leave you my name and address. Or if you’ve got any work I could help with to pay you back now, I’d be happy to—“

“I got a phone. Call someone to getcha.”

“Well, we’ve still got two days drive—“

“This ain’t a church charity, son. Go cry to someone else,” the old man turned away and pulled his hat low over his face.

Erik gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to unbalance the Austin the man had jacked up in the workshop. He went back out to the car. Charles, busy kicking discarded bolts across the yard, looked up and either caught Erik’s thoughts or saw the look on his face.

“Hitchhiking, I guess,” he winced.

Erik huffed a long breath out through his nose. “Got to hide the car, too. They could be tracking all the stolen vehicles from around the facility,” he growled, leaning against it. “Charles, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to carry on in this direction. You still haven’t made contact with your sister, and my gut tells me something’s not right.”

“Well my gut tells me there isn’t. And I’m the psychic.” 

Erik narrowed his eyes at him. “There something you’re not telling me?”

“Of course not, my friend,” said Charles, far too quickly. 

“Tell me.”

“There’s nothing.”

“Tell me,” Erik barked, folding his arms.

Charles’ nostrils flared. He went to run his hand through his hair and gave a moan of annoyance when he touched his close-cropped skull. “Okay, I haven’t made any kind of contact with Raven. She’s way out of my range. But I know where she is.”

Erik gaped at him. “How?”

“Because I’ve been in contact with her,” Charles spun around and threw his arms out in supplication to Erik. He babbled, “She’s been looking for me for three years, Erik, and she’s a smart girl! A few weeks before they threw me in that mirrored cell, she came close enough to the facility for me to talk to her. She’s been based a couple of cities over, planning—” he closed his mouth.

Every muscle in Erik’s body was taut. “Planning what?”

Charles scratched the back of his head and determinedly didn’t break eye contact.

“Planning _what_ , Charles?”

“Planning my escape,” Charles mumbled. “I was going to escape. We had it all worked out.”

Erik felt a black hole open up inside him and begin to consume his internal organs one by one. “Why didn’t you tell me this? I could have helped, we didn’t need to do such a botch job of it… why didn’t you _tell me?”_ he spat.

Charles had stopped fidgeting at last and stood frozen. He said, very small but incapable of a lie right when they both needed it the most, “Because I couldn’t trust you.”

Erik stared at him. 

“I couldn’t trust anyone, you understand, Shaw’s telepath might have read you or you might have… you might have…” he sounded breathless and lost, and his control was fading, his stray thought dancing between them, _might have betrayed me_. Perhaps it was Erik’s thought. 

Erik moved away from the car. There was a rusted bike chain lying on the concrete, near the bolts that Charles had been kicking around. Erik twitched and the chain shot through the air and wrapped around Charles’ throat, lifting him and slamming him into the corrugated side of the mechanic’s. 

“How could you think that?” Erik bellowed. He could feel the hot metal all around – the car, the scraps lying in the grass, the corrugated iron against which Charles’ heels were kicking – shivering like blood circulation returning to limbs freed from a tourniquet. A sense of self-loathing and acidic disillusionment swept over him. He had thrown away his life and the only purpose he had in the world for the lies of a false idol.

Charles was scratching weakly at the chain around his throat, and Erik waited for the voice in his head, waited for that angelic speech to apologise, to beg him for mercy, promise him it would be alright.

But Charles was silent. He was looking directly at Erik, but keeping his thoughts to himself.

Erik dropped his hand and Charles crashed down, his good leg folding at an awkward angle that made him grunt. He swayed on all fours, coughing and rubbing his throat where the chain had left a dotted ring of bruises, like marks on a paper: _cut here_.

The door to the mechanic shop flew open and grandpa greasy stood there, his white hair flying free of its cap and a shotgun extended from under his arm. “What the blazes is going on here?” he bellowed, taking in Charles shuddering on the ground and Erik looming over him.

“Nothing,” Erik snarled. “I’m just going.”

He turned and strode away. Behind him, the metal sheets and car plating finally stopped shaking.


	6. Chapter 6

Erik had walked about two miles down the road when he first noticed the blood on his hand. He had dug his nails so hard into his palm that they had left little crescent-shaped troughs, and one of these was spotted with crimson. He stopped and stared at it, trying to gather his thoughts.

He had to get out of the state, head to the nearest metropolis where it would be easy to disappear. He knew everything about how the facility hunted down mutants and that meant he could keep a step ahead of them. He'd need fake documentation at some point if he was going to slip into a new life, but that could come later, once he'd shaken off their scent. For now his main concerns were gaining distance, money and not being arrested for vagrancy. 

He tried to think calmly about how to achieve the first one, but it was like trying to thread a needle in a storm-tossed boat. Every time he gathered himself together Charles' face appeared in his mind and smashed his thoughts apart.

Charles had lied to him. He had assumed, on some level, that Charles was incapable of lying with his telepathy - wouldn't false thoughts show through, like costume jewellery? But this morning by the river, Charles had _pretended_ to hear Raven's mind, Charles had pretended it was a new and thrilling discovery. They were already heading roughly in that direction before the false discovery - had Charles' powers nudged Erik towards her? Had Charles used mind-control on Erik just like he had on the driver yesterday? How was Erik to know that Charles hadn't been controlling him all along?

It hurt to leave Charles behind. It felt like tearing his hands off. Perhaps that hurt wasn't real, perhaps Charles had planted it there, like a subconscious anchor that would keep Erik protecting him forever. How was Erik supposed to know? Was there a chance that right from the beginning, Charles’ powers had dug their claws into him? Charles had tricked him from day one, had pretended to be a divinity, had used old devotions against him. Charles was a trickster, a liar, a thief of the mind. 

Erik shook his head and kept walking. He had passed right through the small town with the gas station and taken a T-junction away from the main highway and onto a thinly populated road of small orchards and retirement blocks. He didn’t want to follow the same route as Charles. Except that a part of him did, desperately – he wanted to turn right around and go back, hope that Charles caught up with him. 

“Gah!” Erik yelled and punched some poor old couple’s red letterbox. It crumpled like a paper cup under his fist and flew forty feet before rolling along the grass, shedding bronze numerals and flakes of red paint. He flexed his fingers, wincing. 

It just figured. After years of keeping people out, only a telepath could get so stuck in his head. 

He had a few dollars left in his pocket and decided it was safe to be seen in a diner this far from the facility. He ordered their cheapest toast special and a glass of water, and took as long as possible to eat it. If he’d been a spy in some novel, he would have chatted up another diner or maybe the waitress, told some sob story about being robbed and got himself a couch to sleep on for the night. Instead he glared out the window at the setting sun until the cashier started asking him if he wanted “a coffee or something” from the other end of the diner.

“ _Du bläst Trübsal, Erik,_ ” his mother would have said. “You’re moping, Erik.” And then she would have told him to go and apologise to his father, because that was usually what he was sulking about. 

There was nothing for it but to spend a night in the open. He put on his coat and wandered to the edge of town. Out of sight or earshot of the nearest house was an abandoned factory that had once made farming equipment, and now sat empty, its walls rusting and heavy with graffiti. Erik climbed in through a window rather than rip the bolts off a door – he felt safer knowing the door was intact – and found himself a nook between three large, sealed water tanks that had never left the shop floor. He sat slumped with his back to the metal and his hands under his arms and tried to sleep.

He awoke to a boot in his ribs and a shard of crystal in his brain.

\---

Stupid, stupid not to make himself a metal shield around himself before he slept. He reached out for the rust-flaked railing a few feet away and felt it bow towards him. The telepath dug herself in again, like a wasp laying its eggs in a spider. The boot caught him in the gut this time, knocking the wind out of him. He saw Shaw’s shape above him, a cut-out of black paper against the moonlight, but Erik could never mistake the man. 

“Did you really think Emma couldn’t find you?”

Erik threw out his hand in the hope of dragging Shaw down by belt buckle, buttons or tiepin. Of course Shaw had not worn anything metal. He wasn’t stupid like Erik.

“I am so disappointed in you,” Shaw said, stepping back as Erik rolled onto all fours, straining to get his breath back. Shaw’s polished leather toe buried itself in Erik’s abdomen again. He must have had some energy stored up because it sent Erik skidding along the dusty factory floor. His diaphragm unlocked at last and he wheezed for breath. He tried to shove himself to his feet despite the telepath.

“But you know who’s more disappointed?” Shaw intoned from somewhere in the distance. “Your teammates. You weren’t just betraying me.”

There were more shapes closing in, hands and knees pinning him back onto the ground. He recognised their silhouettes: his team from the facility, men he’d worked with for year. Erik bucked and kicked and wriggled, but the meaty hands flipped him over and nylon rope was wound around and around his wrists and ankles. He focused his power on the nails in the floorboards, the struts far above them, the fillings in his team’s teeth. Before he could turn all three into weapons, the telepath closed over him again. 

“You bastard, Lehnscherr!” one of his ex-colleagues snarled, and the fist hit Erik square in the nose as he looked up to see who it was. 

“There’s two boys dead at the base, shithead!” another punch from someone else, and then the sole of a boot slamming down on his bound hands. He felt an electrified snap as his left ring finger fractured. 

“You fucking queer!”

“Traitor!”

“Judas!”

“Cock-sucker!”

There was a grinding pain in his chest that might have been a broken rib and hands dragged him up to get a better shot at his kidneys. The telepath was a smooth layer of pain over it all, ice on top of a winter lake. Erik strained to find metal outside the black clouds settling over his mind and weighing down his powers. There were the water tanks, but they were too much for him in this state. However, he found a rich, complex feast outside – two cars parked beyond the doors of the factory. If he’d only been smart enough to face a window, the headlights might have woken him and he wouldn’t be in this position.

They would sedate him before they threw him in the boot of a car. If he let it go that far, it would be over. He’d be taken back to the facility and Shaw would see to it he never got out again. Dead within the week, and not easily. It would hurt.

He must not let them put him in that car.

He drove out the pain and the shock of a blow to his eye, trying to roll with the punch. Creeping his mind under the telepath’s ringing barrier, he reached for the car engines and crumpled all the tubes and wiring he could touch with the proprioception of his ability. 

\---

Soon enough, Shaw told the men to stop pummelling him and stand back. Erik tried to squirm away, but sharp fingers gripped his shoulders and there was the prick of a needle in his arm. The hazy swirl of a muscle relaxant in his blood. Everything seemed suddenly very mellow. Dessert wine. He had an uncle who had made ice-wine in the mountains. Vineyard confiscated in the war, of course, Uncle shot. Erik’s head spun with memories though the telepath had withdrawn. 

He was vaguely aware of Shaw’s anger and the pain of another few kicks when they discovered his sabotage of the cars. They stopped when he didn’t react. It was no fun when he played dead. He would have giggled at this, but he was too disembodied by the drug. 

He lay prone and watched Shaw’s feet stride back and forth, back and forth. There was some discussion about what to do; finally Shaw radioed back to the facility and ordered a large van to come out and pick them up.

Erik didn’t bother to lift his face from the dirt. A part of him was screaming to fight the effects of the drug, to grasp at his powers through the morass of his mind and kill the telepath while she had her guard down, take care of the rest as they came at him.

But another part of him whispered sadly that he had made this bed for himself. It was finally time to lie in it. It took all his strength just to fight that cruel little voice.

A couple of hours went passed, though it felt faster to Erik. His muddled mind couldn’t follow the conversations of the men around him. One of them always stayed close by him, kicking him back down onto his face when he tried to roll onto his back. Someone lit a cigarette and Erik smelled menthol smoke. They ground out the butt on the side of his neck, but he managed not to make a sound.

He gradually started to come back together again. He reached out gently with his powers, aware of the telepath waiting to pounce. None of his captors were wearing anything metal, not even zips. They carried wooden batons and matches instead of cigarette lighters. They hadn’t even brought torches. He was sure he could use that to his advantage despite the clear, moonlit night. 

The first he was aware of some new development was when one of the men came running back to the group still doing up his fly. He’d gone to relieve himself and seen someone skulking around the overgrown and broken-down factory fence.

“It was the telepath,” he gasped. “I saw his face.”

In an instant, the men stood to attention and Shaw was barking orders. “Go in pairs, watch each other carefully – he can control you, remember, don’t let him get a hold of your mind!” he joined up with two of the men and glanced back. “Emma, you keep Erik comfortable until I return.”

Within seconds, the five sets of footsteps had receded into the darkness and Erik was left with the telepath softly humming to herself as she sat on the edge of an ivy-strewn wooden crate. One of her legs was crossed over the other and her foot was swinging absently. Erik squinted at that foot, at the patent leather, midnight blue shoe on the end of it. People didn’t always realise there were nails in their shoes, and if he could just get a decent hold of them…

A pained cry broke from nearby and stumbling footsteps shattered his concentration. The telepath leapt to her feet, and Erik wriggled himself over enough to raise his head and see Shaw stumbling out of the undergrowth, clutching his head. “He blindsided us!” Shaw croaked. “He’s gained a new trick… get out there and protect the men, you’re the only one who can stop him…”

The telepath glanced quickly at Erik, hissed, “Don’t even think about moving, pumpkin,” and then sprinted off in the direction Shaw had come. 

Shaw hurried over to Erik’s side and knelt beside him. His hands fumbled at Erik’s back and Erik bucked, trying to kick him. Shaw grabbed his wrists and held him down. “Follow my lead, you dumb meathead.”

The words were so odd that Erik froze. He felt Shaw’s fingers on the ropes, picking at the knots and finally pulling them apart and rushing to throw the nylon away. Then Shaw was grabbing his arm and hauling him to his feet. Erik’s legs went from under him at once – his body was still very much pumped with the muscle relaxant – but Shaw held him upright and dragged him towards the side of the building. 

“What the hell is your game?” Erik barked.

Shaw shoved them both around the corner of the factory and put his finger to lips. The way he did it was delicate and unfamiliar. And for a split-second, his eyes flashed a brilliant yellow.

Erik’s swaying mind struggled to remember the name he was looking for. “Raven?” he whispered.

Shaw’s face split into an uncharacteristically cheerful smile. He glanced around and then started to lead Erik around the back of the factory.

They both froze at the same time. Two of Erik’s ex-teammates were coming across the broken-up parking lot towards them, slowing to a halt as they saw Shaw leading an unbound Erik.

“Sir, what are you…?” one of them started.

Erik wasn’t quite fighting fit, but he was mad enough to have a go. His blood pumping hot through his limbs, he reached his hands towards the corrugated iron roof of a shed out of the back of the factory. With a cry he flattened his hands, smoothing the metal’s corrugations and flung it towards the two men. It spun faster and faster with a horizontal sweep of his palms. 

One of the men didn’t quite react in time. The sheet metal dug into his neck and then tore off his head as it spun on its merry way. His body was knocked to the ground as it ripped through the tendons and spinal cord. The head flipped off the flying metal sheet a moment later and rolled across the broken concrete. Erik saw Shaw/Raven flinch out of the corner of his eye, but it was taking all his concentration to keep control of this one piece of metal. He pulled his hands back to his body and it flew back the way it came.

The other man tried to run. Erik’s brows were furrowed and he could feel sweat breaking out on it, but his mouth was a hard line. He put his weight behind the final push and the sheet metal struck the running man in the back. He gave a scream that made Erik’s vision quiver with bloodlust and fell to the ground, spine severed and the metal plate still stuck fast in his torso. 

It was very odd to hear Shaw cry, “Stop it, please,” with his hands to his mouth. 

The man was still yelling as he tried to drag himself to safety. Erik flung out his hands and wrenched the metal sheet out of his nearly-severed abdomen and then brought the bloodied edge down again on his head. It split as neatly as a watermelon under a hatchet and the man fell silent. The metal hung poised for a moment and then fell over with a noise like a gong. 

“Come on,” Erik grabbed Raven’s hand. “The others will have heard that.”

“Yup, I think so,” Raven gulped, pointing across the parking lot. At the edge of the factory boundary where the woods had completely broken down the fence, Shaw and the two remaining soldiers were striding out of the trees. 

Dragging Raven, Erik turned and stumbled back to the back doors of the factory, leaning heavily on the shape shifter. The rollup metal barrier snapped its rusted-solid padlock and slammed upwards as Erik flicked his hand at it. They ran through into the garage and Erik busted through another door and onto the factory floor. He could hear sprinting footsteps behind them, and knew their pursuers were seconds behind. 

“That way, go up there!” Erik barked at Raven, pointing at a flight of metal stairs that lead up to a series of walkways over the workshop. When she hesitated, he gave her a shove that got her moving and she scrambled up the steps. Erik looked around and hurried into a shadowy corner behind a stack of disused machinery. 

The real Shaw and his men appeared a moment later. They saw Raven thumping along the walkway above and ran for the stairs, taking them three at a time. Erik waited, flexing his fingers in preparation. His broken ring finger was on fire but the drugs were actually helping in that regard. Shaw paused halfway up the steps, but the other two men ran onto the walkway. 

Raven took a left turn onto an adjacent walkway. Shaw was still only halfway up, leaning over the railing to look for Erik. 

No time to wait for him. Erik gripped the walkway with his powers and dragged it down, twisting it so that it spilled its passengers into the thin air forty feet above the factory floor. Raven shrieked in terror, but Erik flipped his hand and scooped her up with the buckled grates. The two men made two noises like water bombs bursting as they hit the ground. Neither of them moved.

Shaw had been knocked off the stairs when the walkway came crashing down, but he’d landed on his feet and absorbed the impact. The grill under Raven’s feet was bending beneath her weight and Erik struggled to hold it up as she inched her way towards another metal path bolted to the wall a few feet away. He couldn’t move too much or he was afraid he’d drop her, but Shaw had spotted him. 

Raven made it to safety just as Shaw reached the pile of machinery that Erik was hiding behind. The older man didn’t waste his stored energy knocking it away. Erik was cornered, and he couldn’t throw a decent punch with the muscle relaxant still making him soggy.

Fuck that; he had a go anyway. Shaw absorbed the punch with a headache-inducing shift in appearance and then grabbed Erik’s shoulders and hurled him over the machinery and onto the open floor beyond.

He landed near the huge steel water tanks, and managed to use them as a magnetic cushion to slow himself just before he hit the ground. He rolled, pushing himself groggily to his feet. His vision felt slurred, his movements languid. He had to get ready, Shaw was coming, but everything hurt and his legs wouldn’t take him in a straight line.

“Erik,” Shaw called, polished shoes tapping as he walked across the dusty floor towards him. Erik leaned against one of the water tanks, feeling it shift beneath his touch, but what was he supposed to do with it? The harder he hit Shaw, the harder Shaw would hit back. “Little Erik,” Shaw mocked, stepping over the bodies of the two men who’d fallen from the walkway. “Why do you always let your anger get the better of you, Erik? You’ve made such a mess of your life.”

“I’m pretty sure that was your doing,” Erik rasped, searching desperately for nails or bolts on the floor. 

“But didn’t you enjoy it,” Shaw turned his head slightly, a cold smile breaking across his face. “Wasn’t it more fun than what you had left?”

And then a new voice, accented and wavering slightly, called from the empty doorway through which they’d come. “If that’s you’re idea of fun, you must be rubbish at parties.”

If Erik’s ribs hadn’t hurt so much, he was pretty sure he would have laughed. It was such a terrible entrance line. But Shaw whipped around, and that gave Erik a chance to hurl a piece of the crashed walkway at his head. Shaw deflected it without even looking as a limping shadow peeled away from the door.

“Charles, get out of here!” Raven yelled. She had shaken off Shaw’s image and was a dusky blue shape trapped high above them. “Don’t let him catch you again!”

“No, please Charles, stay,” Shaw, still smiling, spread his arms. 

“Oh, I intend to,” came Charles’ voice, and the shadow put two fingers to its head.

Shaw didn’t answer. In fact, Shaw didn’t move at all. His fingers steepled in front of him, he stood totally still as if in anticipation of some grand spectacle. 

“Charles?” Erik called. “Are you doing this?”

Charles took a couple of uneven steps forward out of the darkness. He had a new cane to lean on and the moonlight pouring through the tall, long-broken windows of the factory made him look whiter than ever. There was a wrinkle set deep between his eyes and his tendons bulged in his neck. The fingers at his temple were shuddering a little, but with his other hand he let go of his cane. It clattered to the floor as he drew something out of his pocket; it was a small flick-knife. The blade glinted as Charles took another step towards Shaw. 

“Don’t,” Erik said sharply. “You’re not a killer, Charles.”

His friend didn’t answer. No soft voice echoed in Erik’s mind. The look in Charles’ eyes was something Erik had never seen before – but no, he had. He had seen it in the mirror every day since his mother died.

He could snatch that knife out of Charles’ hand and bury it in Shaw’s eye. But Charles was inside Shaw’s mind, and Charles would feel it. Erik had hurt and killed plenty of people, but he couldn’t dole out that one brief pain to his friend who had already suffered so much.

Instead, he put his hands flat on the water tank and dug his fingertip tips in. With a screech, the metal split and he dragged at the gap until it widened to an armspan, folded at the edges. He took a breath and thought of Charles’ voice, thought of the immense salvation he had felt when Charles had first appeared in his life. The weight of the metal flooded his body and he wrapped his arms around and began to shift it towards Shaw, still frozen in place.

_What are you doing, Erik?_

“Finishing this,” Erik grunted, as he pushed the gaping water tank right up to Shaw. The man’s body swayed and then, with another push, fell into the tank. Charles stumbled back, re-focusing his concentration.

Erik held out his hands and mentally grasped the edges of the open tank, pulling them together again.

_You can’t leave him in there! He’ll come after us! He’ll never stop, Erik, you can’t leave him alive!_

Erik shook his head in agreement. He rolled his shoulders – ouch, and double ouch – and worked his mind around the water tank. He envisioned holding it in his hands, all around it, and then began to close those hands in.

“Let go of his mind, Charles,” he said. “He doesn’t have enough energy stored to get out, and you don’t want to feel this.”

The water tank began to bow inwards. Erik kept every crack sealed. He pushed the metal together, turning it semi-soft with his will, forcing it to compact and shrink. He could feel every nail and beam and railing in the factory begin to vibrate, feel the cars outside shivering on their suspension. He could feel the cage in Charles’ leg and even the metal spring in a dry ballpoint pen in the office at the other end of the factory. He could feel Shaw scrabbling at the inside of the water tank, thumping against the metal and finding it stinging hot with the force that Erik’s power was exerting on it. He could feel the iron core of the Earth spinning and spinning as it had before he’d been born and would long after. 

The pressure inside the tank built and built as the metal grew thicker and thicker and the circumference of the shell grew smaller. The water tank was a rough sphere now, and Erik could feel every weak spot, every crack starting to open as the molecules strained to release each other, but his mind leapt onto each one and snapped it shut. He increased the pressure inside. Fifty feet below the sea. A hundred. Five hundred. A thousand and counting. 

And then, softly, softly, Shaw went still and quiet. 

Erik fell to his knees, his arms still outstretched, and released his hold on the tank. The pressure inside made it groan and split in several places, releasing air with a hiss. He heard Charles limping to his side. He turned and with a flick of his hand, levitated the new cane into Charles’ hand.

“We should go,” Erik said in a low voice. “His telepath is still out there.” He looked up at where Raven was still perched. Charles’ voice sent a call up to her, _hold on tight, Erik will bring you down!_

“We’ve got time,” Charles said aloud. “Our minds brushed against each other when she went into the woods to look for me. I may not be able to use my powers on her, but I managed to _suggest_ to her that I had sent her in the wrong direction. So she went the other way. She’s thoroughly lost and probably really, really furious at me.”

Erik grinned up at him. Despite everything, Shaw dead and more bodies not a few feet away, Charles had a self-satisfied smile on his face. At last, Erik felt strong enough to stand up again, though he gratefully allowed Charles to prop him up a little. 

“Alright, are you bringing me down or what?” Raven yelled at them. Erik stretched out his hand towards her orphaned walkway. It wasn’t very graceful, but with much slipping and a few shrieks from the shapeshifter Erik lowered her platform close enough to the ground for her to jump off. She ran over to them, pulled Charles into a tight embrace and then glanced at Erik.

“Good to finally meet you,” she said, holding out one blue hand. “Charles doesn’t talk about much else recently.”

“Really?” Erik frowned, shaking her hand. In his tone, and presumably at the front of his mind, were all his doubts and fears about Charles’ friendship and lies. Charles must have caught the tone in both, because the arm around Erik’s waist tightened.

“I came back for you!” Charles said indignantly, and in that phrase was all the clarity and certainty with which the young man saw the situation – the absolute conviction that yes, Erik _would_ forgive him, and they would forget about that silly fight they had, because they were _friends_ and that was a rare thing for both of them. Erik didn’t need to hear Charles’ thoughts to know that that conviction was real. He couldn’t see – or didn’t believe – Erik’s doubt, all the cruel and merciless things that had gone through Erik’s mind since they had parted. Charles saw him as someone so different. 

And to Erik he wasn’t G-d, no, but something just as good. 

“Your face looks awful,” Charles winced, gazing up at him. “You need to put a steak or something on that, my friend. I’m not kidding.” 

\---

The three of them found their way back to the road where Charles and Raven had left the stolen Buick (Charles had purportedly willed the greasy grandpa at the gas station to give him a whole tank for free). 

“What do we do now?” the younger man asked, leaning between the front seats. Raven had taken the wheel, and Erik the passenger side – he was far too sore and drugged-up to drive anywhere for a while. They pulled away from the shoulder and headed away into the darkness. As they emerged from the bank of trees the first glow of sunrise began to show across the empty fields. “The facility isn’t going to close down just because Shaw’s dead. And Raven thinks the CIA may be aware of mutants too, so there could be a lot of people looking for us soon enough.”

Erik realised that both the youngsters were watching him, waiting for him to make the decision. He huffed a laugh, and it didn’t feel like his rib was broken after all, just very bruised. He glanced at Charles, “Do you think your powers could get us passports? A new one for Raven, too, with a new name.”

“Maybe,” Charles said, his brow furrowed. “We’d have to come up with a detailed plan. Like criminals in an old film noir.”

“Where would we go?” Raven asked. She was not blue anymore, but the rosy blonde teenager that Erik had once glimpsed in Charles’ thoughts. He hoped she didn’t keep the mask in private as well. Her natural strangeness had seemed lovely. He could barely believe how young she must have been when she started looking for her lost brother.

“Maybe Europe,” Erik said, though many more names ran through his mind – Chile, Laos, New Zealand, Turkey – each of which were wonderful because they were not here. Although parts of here weren’t so bad. Here in this car, for instance, was just fine. 

“Can we see where you grew up?” Charles cried, leaning even further forward between the seats so that his elbow almost jabbed Raven in the face. “Can you teach me German?”

“Sit down and put your seat belt on,” Raven scolded.

Erik found the seat lever with his mind and with a twitch of his fingers leaned it back until Charles grumbled and moved to the other side of the backseat. Erik smiled to himself and closed his eyes as he settled himself in a position that kept his weight of the worst bruises. He could feel sleep tugging insistently at him, and let it take him outside the range of his hunger and aches and worries. The last thing he heard before he drifted off were his two companions arguing about the route they were taking.

Over the horizon, the dawn broke at last.


End file.
